Posts Tagged ‘pseudo-eugenics’

According to the Merriam-Webster’s English dictionary, the meaning of the word ‘eugenics’ is simply “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed”. There exists no agenda in eugenics beyond the application of stock-breeding to humans, which means that some form of eugenics is probably compatible with all religions and cultures, indeed cultures have been practicing eugenics for thousands of years (often without a comparable term), and eugenics doesn’t prescribe a means or even in itself a definition of which traits are eugenic. Nonetheless, leaving aside value judgements out of the question as much as is possible, there is a value-neutral measure of what is eugenic – the fitness of the population, in the sense that would be understood by conservation biologists, is not a social construct.

Why, then, do eugenicists get my back up when I read them on the internet? It’s for three reasons that I can think of, which are their lack of understanding of the relevant science, they feel attracted to the famous anti-eugenic straw man of the ‘war against the weak’ and live in such an agenda-driven unreality that they can’t see eugenic programs would, if applied in the present social climate of Cultural Marxism, actually be used against themselves and their offspring.

Lets give online eugenics a reality check to see how well it stands up to scrutiny – the Spartans and the Nazis may not have valued all human lives equally but nonetheless the lives of their own people possessed value until it was demonstrated otherwise. Amazonian tribes practice infanticide to increase the fitness of the group, but it isn’t the general position – forcing a mother to kill her own baby is clearly a punishment inflicted for exceptional, inappropriate reproductive behaviour that threatens the survival of a subsistence society. When you get to pseudo-eugenicists decrying that human lives are assumed to have inherent value at all unless there’sa reason otherwise, which isn’t the belief that all human life has equal value, we’re dealing with the pathological and, if there’s an allele that predisposed them to think like that, with the dysgenic.

Much of the appeal of pseudo-eugenics is at the emotional rather than the rational level. Online eugenicists are famously outspoken in support of what are known as anti-dysgenic or negative eugenic measures, whilst they say next to nothing in support of positive eugenics. This is because poorly reasoned pseudo-eugenics is an outlet for them to vent frustration at society. There isn’t really a serious argument to consider there, just a boring and parrot-like repetition of Freakonomics-like half-truths by people unable to understand the sciences even at the most basic level. An informative irony here is that many of these people who talk about eugenics, which is related to breeding, never seem to have sex or offspring themselves. It must be very frustrating for such beta male basement dwellers, to see all those ‘cads’ out-reproducing dads whilst they’re watching porn on their computers. These people often see dominant, traditional alpha males as though they were omega thugs, one wonders why that might be.

Moving from psychology to philosophy, let us consider the following proposition as an analogy to common pseudo-eugenic thinking about social issues.

“Black people should be allowed to own guns, because black criminals mostly shoot one another, and therefore we should overlook the white victims of black gun criminals as a collateral damage of criminal blacks wiping themselves out. We should encourage blacks to own firearms (or, at the very least, tolerate the ready availability of firearms to black criminals).”

Most people would, hopefully, see the above logic as insane, especially if they are white advocates. Anyone who would argue for such a thing would be turning a blind eye to the damage being inflicted upon their own people, out of their irrational resentment towards outsiders. Yet this is precisely the thinking of people who follow the crazy Freakonomics line of argument even after the author admitted his argument was false. Even worse than gun violence, liberalised abortion particularly hollows out individuals with eugenic traits – either abortion should be very strictly regulated for the proper purposes (as it is in Iran), or access to the procedure should be forbidden at all costs. Effective modern contraception is also abused too often by those we wish to have more children.

As for the argument about single mothers (ie. regardless of race), this is quite clearly moral aggression and misplaced altruistic punishment. Regardless of intent, by downplaying the role of society as well as heredity in the life choices of individuals from a given background. Targeting entire communities for negative eugenics isn’t the same as targeting the more harmful members of those communities such as drug addicts, of course this is anti-white and offensive where the support for grassroots activism would be strongest. People who believe that perfectly healthy white children should be burned as hospital waste because it will save money for society are an undesirable artifact of a society that good people won’t wish to preserve. I don’t want to sound like a feminist here, but I’d choose honest single mothers signing on for state benefits over the genetic load of resentful basement dwellers, any time I might be forced to choose.

If we look at the strange logic of pseudo-eugenics, it commits a confusion along the lines of is and ought – their argument assumes (contra Galton, and history itself) that antinatalist measures will be taken up by those who they see as bad people, whilst those they see as good people will embrace their own way of thinking. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the error in this kind of thinking. Along the same lines they like to insist that, if the good people aren’t breeding, its because of indoctrination by feminism and related social movements which in turn, implicitly suggests that the desirable people would instantly start to behave as the pseudo-eugenicists think they should, if only they could be shown the light of pseudo-eugenics to set them free. There is no thought given to the possibility that societies might be predisposed to nonsense like feminism as a consequence of antinatalist trends. If all human behaviours are natural then tendencies that evolved as a means to control population size in the ancient past have now kicked into self-destructive overdrive because of excess affluence – Japan has a birthrate below replacement, but how many women in Japan have been exposed to feminist perspectives? Japan has however suffered from the same kind of excessive affluence disintegrating the west.

Those who support social approval for methods such as abortion that violate the organic bonds of parenthood, or amount to the pre-emptive executions of those who may not yet turn out criminal, are in outright violation of our culture and such people require their twisted values to be re-educated. Every life of one of our own people, who can at the very least contribute through inclusive fitness, really is ‘sacred’, for want of a better word, not for sentimental reasons but because we have an interest in our own survival. And this means that, when the time comes, those who have treated white offspring as trash will need to be ‘removed’ from the breeding stock.